Wyoming’s primary election delivered some surprises. Wyoming Public Radio’s state government and politics reporter, Jordan Uplinger, checked in with University of Wyoming professor Ryan Williamson, who studies electoral politics and institutions. They started with his biggest takeaway from the results.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Ryan Williamson: It was somewhat surprising to see the number of losses suffered by the Freedom Caucus. We shouldn't be too surprised that they didn't fare very well. Over the last 100 years, it's essentially guaranteed that public sentiment will shift in the opposite direction of the president's party.
So you shouldn't be too terribly surprised to see the Freedom Caucus struggle as public sentiment shifts slightly towards the center or the left, and therefore the appetite for some of the more hard-line conservative positions that the Freedom Caucus espouses, when they run on those positions, they're going to struggle. But even the Freedom Caucus themselves said that even they didn't expect this level of opposition to their candidates.
Jordan Uplinger: How is it that on a state level, it seems like that group kinda took losses, but on a federal level, it seems like they succeeded without too much struggle?
RW: I think there's a few factors to consider here. First, Chuck Gray and Harriet Hageman both have high levels of rank name recognition relative to the people that they were running against. They were very well-funded, and they'd won statewide elections before, so they had experience. They were familiar to voters.
They weren't a part of the Legislature during the last session, where the Freedom Caucus was very aggressive in its pursuit of some certain policies that proved to not be particularly popular with the electorate.
So I think that collection of factors is kind of what contributed to the apparent discrepancy between what we see in the federal races versus the more state and local races.
JU: Now, the turnout was also kind of interesting. I have voter turnout at about 150,000, and we note that that's higher than the 2024 presidential primary, but lower than the 2022 midterms, the last time the governor was on the ballot. Does lower voter turnout tend to give support to maybe the farther edges of the party?
RW: I wouldn't say there's an ideological bent to turnout, but what I can say is when turnout is lower – I think we're at about 33% of eligible voters in this cycle – that means the people that do show up, their vote carries a disproportionate weight.
In a state like Wyoming, which is the least populous, which has dozens of races on the ballot, you're gonna have some races that are decided by just a few dozen or a few hundred votes. So if one particular group is mobilized and they show up to vote and others don't, that's really going to affect the outcome.
JU: The state GOP kind of broke norm and endorsed a couple of different candidates. And so you have a red state giving endorsements from its red party, and you're also getting endorsements at the federal level from the red president. And I'm wondering: Does it even matter at that point? If you're a voter going into a primary, and there's five different endorsements, but they're all from generally conservatives, does it matter anymore? Does an endorsement actually help?
RW: That's a great question. There's a lot of political science research that says endorsements aren't particularly helpful, and there are several reasons why.
First, an endorsement can actually serve to countermobilize the opposition against a particular candidate. So there could be instances where an endorsement is actually a net negative for a particular candidate.
Also, endorsements can be useful in a low information, low salience environment like a primary election. But as we talked about, only about 33% of eligible voters showed up. And so what we would expect to see is more engaged, more informed voters participating, and therefore, an endorsement isn't going to do a lot of work for them. For the people for whom an endorsement would be the most informative, those are the same people who are the least likely to participate.
And so for that reason, I don't expect endorsements to have made a whole lot of a difference in this election.
JU: What happens now to the Freedom Caucus members who survived the night? The ones who, I imagine, still hold the same views and ideology but aren't working with a majority or a sizable force anymore. What [are] the next steps for this group now?
RW: There's this concept in political science called Duverger's Law, which suggests that with every single-member district plurality system, you're going to devolve into a two-party system, and that's what we have in Wyoming. That's what most states across the country have.
Important to note, in Wyoming, the Democratic Party is not necessarily a viable option for many voters. They only hold a few seats in the legislature. They haven't held statewide office in several cycles. So the Freedom Caucus essentially serves as the second party within Wyoming.
If we take that as fact, then when we think about the future of the Freedom Caucus, we can think of it the same way as we would think of any other political party. They will regroup. They will think about fielding candidates in the future. They will think about what their platform looks like. They will think about what their strategy is, both electorally and legislatively. And they will continue to try to just win additional seats in subsequent cycles, just as any other party would.
JU: What are the steps now for the state GOP?
RW: What we're really seeing in Wyoming is a battle over what it means to be a Republican and what it means to be a conservative. If the state GOP wants to win that battle, they're gonna have to think long and hard about what makes their candidates viable.
It is important to remember that these are still conservative Republicans who are winning these offices, so I don't expect to see wholesale changes with respect to some of the policies that are being pursued.
But what I would expect to see is a reshuffling of priorities, focusing on perhaps more state and localized issues, and focusing less on some of the more sensitive and incendiary topics that the Freedom Caucus was approaching more head-on.
JU: Given that Wyoming is a red state, do you think that the general election numbers will also be kind of a bellwether for how conservatives are doing?
RW: None of this should be construed as anything other than Republicans are going to win in November. That being said, though, it could signal general disaffection with the Republican Party if we see those margins narrow. Winning an election 75% to 25% is very different than winning an election 60% to 40%, for example. So that could be a particularly interesting dynamic to watch.
